Lorna Dee Cervantes: For Mahmoud Darwish

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A fifth generation Californian of Mexican and Native American (Chumash) heritage, Lorna Dee Cervantes was born on August 6, 1954, in San Francisco, and raised in San Jose.

She is the author of From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (Arte Público Press, 1991) and Emplumada (1981), which won an American Book Award.

She is also co-editor of Red Dirt, a cross-cultural poetry journal, and her work has been included in many anthologies including Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (eds. Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan, 1994), No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Women Poets (ed. Florence Howe, 1993), and After Aztlan: Latino Poets of the Nineties (ed. Ray González, 1992).

In 1995 she received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award.

Palestine

for Mahmoud Darwish

“We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere.../ .../ We have a country of words. Speak. Speak so we may know the end of this travel.” (from We Travel like Other People, the lines quoted are from his poem “Psalm 2”)

a country you carry in your pocketairport to airport, a countrythat exists for you in a rememberedfragrance, an expired stamp, now the sealof blood embossed upon someone'ssunstruck pavement. Who ownsthis property? Who owns the rightto no way out but a busted windowa hundred flights up? Who owns the keyto Heaven's Gate? Did it open?

I open the newspaper, my computer,an account, and need to account for allthe terror in the world, in crossingthe street with my child this morning,our Indian heads and Palestinian shrouds.With what do we pay? For whatattention? I want to draw its shape“scattered in files and surprises....flying on shrapnel and bird's wings....trapped between the dagger and the wind.I want to draw your shapeto find my shape in yours....”

And whatif the source of deathis not the daggeror the lie?But both. Buried deepin the human rubble.Closer to Godthan thee.